Massimo Pulini

Massimo Pulini was born in 1958 in the northern Italian town of Cesena. He has won international acclaim for his artwork and in 2002 was commissioned by the Vatican Museums to paint the ceiling of the entrance to Pope John Paul II’s private library. In 2006 he was invited to hold a solo show at the prestigious Italian Cultural Institute in London curated by Sir Denis Mahon, the renowned British art collector and historian of Italian art. Pulini was also included in a major retrospective of 20th-century Italian art held in 2000 at the Scuderie del Quirinale, one of Rome’s top public museum spaces.

Pulini’s latest works, recently exhibited at the Diocesan Museum in Massa, pay tribute to the mysterious and dynamic power of words and images as crucial influences on his life. Using plexiglass and glass as a support, Pulini has created some 105 oil paintings dedicated to alphabets – Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Cyrillic and Arabic, “the pillars of the world in which I was born and have lived,” in Pulini’s words.

The subjects correspond to the principal painting genres: portraits, nudes, still lifes and landscapes. A renowned expert on Baroque art, Pulini’s subjects are the fruit of his imagination, even if the effect is familiar to our eye. The letters blend with the subjects represented, creating a fresh narrative and new meaning.